“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

The Creepy King Effect: Why We Can't Help Confusing Writers with Their Characters

Every writer faces this conundrum:
your success hinges on your ability to create impressions that provoke emotions
in the people who read your work, so you need feedback from a large sample of
readers to gauge the effect of your writing. Without feedback, you have no way
to calibrate the impact of your efforts and thus no way to hone your skills.
This is why writers’ workshops are so popular; they bring a bunch of budding
authors together to serve as one another’s practice audience. The major
drawback to this solution is that a sample composed of fellow authorly
aspirants may not be representative of the audience you ultimately hope your
work will appeal to.

Whether or not they attend a
workshop, all writers avail themselves of the ready-made trial audience
comprised of their family and friends, a method which inevitably presents them
with yet another conundrum: anyone who knows the author won’t be able to help
mixing her up with her protagonists. The danger isn’t just that the feedback you
get will be contaminated with moral judgments and psychological assessments;
you also risk offending people you care about who will have a tough time not assuming
identify with characters who bear even the most superficial resemblance to
them. And of course you risk giving everyone the wrong idea about the type of
person you are and the type of things you get up to.

My first experience of being
mistaken for one of my characters occurred soon after I graduated from college.
A classmate and fellow double-major in psychology and anthropology asked to
read a story I’d mentioned I was working on. Desperate for feedback, I emailed
it to her right away. The next day I opened my inbox to find a two-page
response to the story which treated everything described in it as purely
factual and attempted to account for the emotional emptiness I’d demonstrated
in my behavior and commentary. I began typing my own response explaining I
hadn’t meant the piece to be taken as a memoir—hence the fictional name—and
pointing to sections she’d missed that were meant to explain why the character
was emotionally empty (I had deliberately portrayed him that way), but as I
composed the message I found myself getting angry. As a writer of fiction, you
trust your readers to understand that what you’re writing is, well, fiction,
regardless of whether real people and real events figure into it to some
degree. I felt like that trust had been betrayed. I was being held personally
responsible for behaviors and comments that for all she knew I had invented whole-cloth
for the sake of telling a good story.

To complicate matters, the events
in the story my classmate was responding to were almost all true. And yet it
still seemed tremendously unfair for anyone to have drawn conclusions about me
based on it. The simplest way to explain this is to point out that you have an
entirely different set of goals if you’re telling a story about yourself to a
friend than you do if you’re telling a story about a fictional character to anyone
who might read it—even if they’re essentially the same story. And your goals
affect your choice of not only which events to include, but which aspects of
the situation and which traits of the characters to focus on. Add in even a few
purely fabricated elements and you can dramatically alter the readers’
impression of the characters.

Another way to think about this is
to imagine how boring fiction would be if all authors knew they would be
associated with and held accountable for everything their protagonists do or
say. This is precisely why it’s so important to avoid mistaking writers for
their characters, and why writers feel betrayed when that courtesy isn’t
afforded to them. Unfortunately, that courtesy is almost never afforded to them.
Indeed, if you call readers out for conflating you with your characters, many
of them will double down on their mistake. As writers who feel our good names
should be protected under the cover of the fiction label, we have to accept
that human psychology is constantly operating to poke giant holes in that cover.

Let’s try an experiment: close your
eyes for a moment and try to picture Jay Gatsby’s face in your mind’s eye. If
you’re like me, you imagined one of two actors who played Gatsby in the movie
versions, either Leonardo DiCaprio or Robert Redford. The reason these actors
come so readily to mind is that imagining a character’s face from scratch is
really difficult. What does Queequeq look like? Melville describes him in some
detail; various illustrators have given us their renditions; a few actors have
portrayed him, albeit never in a film you’d bother watching a second time.
Since none of these movies is easily recallable, I personally have to struggle
a bit to call an image of him to mind. What’s true of characters’ physical
appearances is also true of nearly everything else about them. Going from words
on a page to holistic mental representations of human beings takes effort, and
even if you put forth that effort the product tends to be less than perfectly
vivid and stable.

In lieu of a well-casted film, the
easiest shortcut to a solid impression is to substitute the author you know for
the character you don’t. Actors are also mistaken for their characters with
disturbing frequency, or at least assumed to possess similar qualities. (“I’m
not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”) To be fair, actors are chosen for roles
they can convincingly pull off, and authors, wittingly or otherwise, infuse
their characters with tinctures of their own personalities. So it’s not like
you won’t ever find real correspondences.

You can nonetheless count on your
perception of the similarities being skewed toward gross exaggeration. This is
owing to a phenomenon social psychologists call the fundamental attribution
error. The basic idea is that, at least in individualist cultures, people tend
to attribute behavior to the regular inclinations of the person behaving as opposed
to more ephemeral aspects of the situation: the driver who cut you off is
inconsiderate and hasty, not rushing to work because her husband’s car broke
down and she had to drop him off first. One of the classic experiments on this
attribution bias had subjects estimate people’s support for Fidel Castro based
on an essay they’d written about him. The study, conducted by Edward Jones and
Victor Harris
at the height of the Cold War, found that even if people were told that the
author was assigned a position either for or against Castro based on a coin
toss they still assumed more often than not that the argument reflected the
author’s true beliefs.

The implication of Jones and
Harris’s findings is that even if an author tries to assure everyone that she
was writing on behalf of a character for the purpose of telling a story, and
not in any way trying to use that character as a mouthpiece to voice some argument
or express some sentiment, readers are still going to assume she agrees with
everything her character thinks and says. As readers, we can’t help giving too
little weight to the demands of the story and too much weight to the
personality of the author. And writers can’t even count on other writers not to
be biased in this way. In 2001, Eric Hansen,
Charles Kimble, and David Biers conducted a series of experiments that
instructed people to treat a fellow study participant in either a friendly or
unfriendly way and then asked them to rate each other on friendliness. Even
though they all got the same type of instructions, and hence should have
appreciated the nature of the situational influences, they still attributed unfriendliness
in someone else to that person’s disposition. Of course, their own
unfriendliness they attributed to the instructions.

One of the theories for why we Westerners
fall prey to the fundamental attribution error is that creating dual
impressions of someone’s character takes a great deal of effort. Against the
immediate and compelling evidence of actual behavior, we have nothing but an
abstract awareness of the possibility that the person may behave differently in
different circumstances. The ease of imagining a person behaving similarly even
without situational factors like explicit instructions makes it seem more
plausible, thus creating the illusion that we can somehow tell whether someone
following instructions, performing a scene, or writing on behalf of a fictional
character is being sincere—and naturally enough we nearly always think they
are.

The underlying principle here—that
we’re all miserly with our cognition—is bad news for writers for yet another
reason. Another classic study, this one conducted by Daniel Gilbert and his
colleagues, was reported in an article titled “You Can’t Not
Believe Everything You Read,” which for a fiction writer sounds rather heartening
at first. The experiment asked participants to determine prison sentences for
defendants in imaginary court cases based on statements that were color-coded
to signal they were either true or false. Even though some of the statements
were marked as false, they still affected the length of the sentences, and the
effect grew even more pronounced when the participants were distracted or
pressed for time.

The researchers interpret these findings
to mean that believing a statement is true is crucial to comprehending it. To understand
the injunction against thinking of a pink elephant, you have to imagine the
very pink elephant you’re not supposed to think about. Only after comprehension
is achieved can you then go back and tag a statement as false. In other words,
we automatically
believe what we hear or read and only afterward, with much cognitive
effort, go back and revise any conclusions we arrived at based on the faulty
information. That’s why sentences based on rushed assessments were more severe—participants
didn’t have enough time to go back and discount the damning statements that
were marked as false.

If those of us who write fiction
assume that our readers rely on the cognitive shortcut of substituting us for
our narrators or protagonists, Hansen et al’s and Gilbert’s findings suggest yet
another horrifying conundrum. The more the details of our stories immerse
readers in the plot, the more difficulty they’re going to have taking into
account the fictional nature of the behaviors being enacted in each of the
scenes. So the more successful you are in writing your story, the harder it’s
going to be to convince anyone you didn’t do the things you so expertly led
them to envision you doing. And I suspect, even if readers know as a matter of
fact you probably didn’t enact some of the behaviors described in the story,
their impressions of you will still be influenced by a sort of abstract
association between you and the character. When a reader seems to be confusing
me with my characters, I like to pose the question, “Did you think Stephen King
wanted to kill his family when you read The
Shining?” A common answer I get is, “No, but he is definitely creepy.”
(After reading King’s nonfiction book On
Writing, I personally no longer believe he’s creepy.)

When people talk to me about
stories of mine they’ve read, they almost invariably use “you” as a shorthand
for the protagonist. At least, that’s what I hope they’re doing—in many cases,
though, they betray no awareness of the story as a story. To them, it’s just a
straightforward description of some real events. Of course, when you press them
they allow for some creative license; they’ll acknowledge that maybe it didn’t
all happen exactly as it’s described. But that meager allowance still tends to
leave me pretty mortified. Once, I even had a family member point to some
aspects of a character that were recognizably me and suggest that they
undermined the entire story because they made it impossible for her to imagine
the character as anyone but me. In her mind, my goal in writing was to disguise
myself behind the character, but I’d failed to suppress my true feelings. I
tried to explain that I hadn’t tried to hide anything; I’d included elements of
my own life deliberately because they served what were my actual goals. I don’t
think she was convinced. At any rate, I never got any good feedback from her
because she simply didn’t understand what I was really trying to do with the
story. And ever since I’ve been taking a reader’s use of “you” to refer to the
protagonist as an indication that I’ll need to go elsewhere for any useful
commentary.

I’m pretty sure all fiction writers
incorporate parts of their own life stories into their work. I’d even go so far
as to posit that, at least for literary writers, creating plots and characters is
more a matter of rearranging bits and pieces of real events and real people’s sayings
and personalities into a coherent sequence with a beginning, middle, and end—a
dilemma, resolution, and outcome—than it is of conjuring scenes and actors out
of the void. But even a little of this type of rearranging is enough to make
any judgments about the author seem pretty silly to anyone who can put the true
details back together in their original order. The problem is the author is
often the only one who knows what parts are true and how they actually happened,
so you’re left having to simply ask her what she really thinks, what she really
feels, and what she’s really done. For everyone else, the story only seems like
it can tell them something when they already know whatever it is it might tell
them. So they end up being tricked into making the leap from bits and pieces of
recognizable realities to an assumption of general truthiness.

Even the greatest authors get mixed
up in people’s minds with their characters. People think Rabbit Angstrom and
John Updike are the same person—or at least that the character is some kind of
distillation of the author. Philip Roth gets mistaken for both Nathan Zuckerman
(though Roth seems to have wanted that to happen) and Mickey Sabbath, two very
different characters. I even wonder if readers assume some kinship between
Hilary Mantel and her fictional version of Thomas Cromwell. So I have to accept
that my goal with this essay is ridiculously ambitious. As long as I write,
people are going to associate me with my narrators and protagonists to one
degree or another.

********

Nevertheless, I’m going to do
something that most writers are loath to do. I’m going to retrace the steps
that went into the development of my latest story so everyone can see what I
mean when I say I’m responding to the demands of the story or making characters
serve the goals of the story. By doing so, I hope to show how quickly real life character
models and real life events get muddled, and why there could never be anything
like a straightforward method for drawing conclusions about the author based on his or her characters.

The story is titled The Fire Hoarder and it follows a
software engineer nearing forty who decides to swear off his family and friends
for an indefinite amount of time because he’s impatient with their complacent mediocrity
and feels beset by their criticisms, which he perceives as expressions of envy
and insecurity. My main inspirations were a series of conversations with a
recently divorced friend about the detrimental effects of
marriage and parenthood on a man’s identity, a beautiful but somehow eerie nature preserve in my
hometown where I fell into the habit of taking weekly runs, and the HBO series True Detective.

The newly divorced friend, whom
I’ve known for almost twenty years, became a bit of a fitness maniac over this
past summer. Mainly through grueling bike rides, he lost all the weight he’d
put on since what he considered his physical prime, going from something like
235 to 190 pounds in the span of few months. Once, in the midst of a night of
drinking, he began apologizing for all the time he’d been locked away, gaining
weight, doing nothing with his life. He said he felt like he’d let me down, but
I have to say it hadn’t ever occurred to me to take it personally. Months
later, in the process of writing my story, I realized I needed some kind of
personal drama in the protagonist’s life, something he would already be
struggling with when the instigating events of the plot occurred.

So my divorced friend, who turned 39 this summer (I’m just turning 37 myself), ended up serving as a partial
model for two characters, the protagonist who is determined to get in better
shape, and the friend who betrays him by being too comfortable and lazy in his
family life. He shows up again in the words of yet another character, a police
detective and tattoo artist who tries to convince the protagonist that single
life is better than married life. Though, as one of the other models for that
character, an actual police detective and tattoo artist, was quick to notice,
the cop in the story is based on a few other people as well.

My own true detective meets the
protagonist at a bar after the initial scene. The problem I faced with this
chapter was that the main character had already decided to forswear socializing.
I handled this by describing the relationship between the characters as one
that didn’t include any kind of intimate revelations or profound
exchanges—except when it did (like in this particular scene). “Oh man,” read
the text I got from the real detective, “I hope I am not as shallow of a friend
as Ray is to Russell?” And this is a really good example of how responding to
the demands of the story can give the wrong impression to anyone looking for
clues about the author’s true thoughts and feelings. (He later assured me he
was just busting my balls.)

Russell’s name was originally
Steve; I changed it late in the writing process to serve as an homage to Rustin
Cohle, one of the lead characters in True
Detective. Before I ever even began watching the show, one of my brothers,
the model for Russell’s brother Nick, compared me to Rust. He meant it as a
compliment, but a complicated one. Like all brothers, our relationship is
complimentary, but complicated. A few of the things my brother has said that
have annoyed me over the past few years show up in the story, but whereas this
type of commentary is subsumed in our continuing banter, which is almost
invariably good-humored, it really gets under Russell’s skin. In a story, one
of the goals is to give texture to the characters’ backgrounds, and another
goal is often to crank up the tension. So I often include more serious versions
of petty and not-so-memorable spats I have with friends, lovers, and family
members in my plots and character bios. And when those same friends, lovers,
and family members read the resulting story I have to explain that it doesn’t
mean what they think it means. (I haven’t gotten any texts from my brother
about the story yet.) I won't go into the details of my love life here; suffice it to say writers pretty much have to be prepared for their wives or girlfriends to flip out whenever they read one of their stories featuring fictional wives or girlfriends.

I was initially put off by True Detective for the same reasons I
have a hard time stomaching any hardboiled fiction. The characters use the
general foulness of the human race to justify their own appalling behavior.
“The world needs bad men,” Rust says to his partner. “They keep the other bad
men from the door.” The conceit is that life is so ugly and people are so evil
that we should all just walk around taking ourselves far too seriously as we bemoan
the tragedy of existence. At one point, Rust tells some fellow detectives about
M-theory, an outgrowth of superstring theory. The show tries to make it sound
tragic and horrifying. But the tone of the scene is perfectly nonsensical. Why
should thinking about extra dimensions be like rubbing salt in our existential
wounds? The view of the world that emerges is as embarrassingly adolescent as it
is screwball.

But much of the dialogue in the
show is magnificent, and the scene-by-scene progression of the story is virtuoso.
When I first watched it, the conversations about marriage and family life
resonated with the discussions I’d been having with my divorced friend over the
summer. And Rust in particular forces us to ask what becomes of a man who finds
the common rituals and diversions to be resoundingly devoid of meaning. The
entire mystery of the secret cult at the center of the plot, with all its crude
artifacts made of sticks, really only succeeds as a prop for Rust’s
struggle with his own character. He needs something to obsess over. But the bad
guy at the end, the monster at the end of the dream, is destined to
disappoint. I included my own true detective in The Fire Hoarder so there would be someone who could explain why
not finding such monsters is worse than finding them. And I went on to explore
what a character like Rust, obsessive, brilliant, skeptical, curious, and
haunted would do in the absence of a bad guy to hunt down. But my guy wouldn’t
take himself so seriously.

If you add in the free indirect
style of narration I enjoy in the works of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Ian
McEwan, Hilary Mantel, and others, along with some of the humor you find in their
novels, you have the technique I used, the tone I tried to strike, and my
approach to dealing with the themes. (The revelation at the end that one of the
characters is acting as the narrator is a trick I’m most familiar with from
McEwan’s Sweet Tooth.) The ideal reader response to my story would focus on these issues of style and technique, and
insofar as the comments took on topics like the vividness of the characters or the feelings they
inspired it would do so as if they were entities entirely separate from me and
the people I know and care about.

But I know that would be asking a
lot. The urge to read stories, the pleasure we take in them, is a product of
the same instincts that make us fascinated with gossip. And we have a nasty
tendency to try to find hidden messages in what we read, as though we were
straining to hear the whispers we can’t help suspecting are about us--and not
exactly flattering. So, as frustrated as I get with people who get the wrong
idea, I usually come around to just being happy there are some people out there
who are interested enough in what I’m doing to read my fiction.